The umbrella brand for Leon Kirkbeck and Michelle Walshe’s stable of companies is so unusual, it might have been beamed in from space. How did they land upon the name?
The name ‘UFO Rodeo’ sums up two things you ought to know about Leon Kirkbeck, Co-founder and Managing Director of the newly christened suite of businesses created with his wife, fellow Co-founder and CEO Michelle Walshe.
Firstly, he loves UFOs. He’s one of the trio behind The Cryptid Factor – a lo-fi podcast about weird monsters, alien sightings and phenomena science can’t explain.
Secondly: “I just hate the word group,” says Kirkbeck – though he’s smiling as he speaks.
“You say it and your mouth is a horrible shape.
“It sounds like you’re officious – group – it’s everything that we are not. And I didn’t want to feel like we are a bunch of individual companies that we’ve acquired and just mashed together.”
Quite the opposite. “All of the departments work collaboratively and across multiple different projects.”
All the businesses in the stable – Augusto, Ballyhoo, Dark Doris and Cornerstore – have their own niche, but they work together under one roof. A new roof, in fact – part of the UFO transformation was a move to new premises in central Auckland’s buzzy Uptown neighbourhood. It’s a former car mechanics renovated to accommodate the rodeo with some filmset touches: the sun-bleached concrete façade was meticulously painted to blend in with an apartment block next door, and a giant wall of frosted glass windows is actually a clever lighting rig that mimics daytime conditions outside.
Little delights are everywhere: Kirkbeck is chuffed to have a home for ephemera collected over the years (including a coin-operated rocking horse ride for children and a caravan once owned by Jacinda Ardern), but the name might be chief among them.
“Having our collective noun as a ‘rodeo’… now when you’re hiring somebody and you can go, ‘Of course, they can work across the whole rodeo – rather than the whole group.’ It’s just so much nicer to say.”
But what does it mean? The answer is, of course, a story.
“I do this podcast called The Cryptid Factor. It’s about crazy – Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, which has all become very hip and cool now.
Before it was cool
“We were doing it 15 years ago on George FM, when it was certainly not very cool. It went out on Sunday morning at 7am or something like that. And we would come on and start talking about how Bigfoot’s real.”
Beginning back in 2008, it is the longest running podcast in Aotearoa, recently celebrating its 100th episode.
“We were doing an episode and there was a UFO crash in Nevada – alleged UFO crash. And the guy on the news says, ‘Well here at Channel 10, of course, it’s not our first UFO rodeo.’
“And it just stuck in my head. I’m like: UFO Rodeo… love it. For some reason it conjures up everything and nothing at the same time.”
A few days later, Kirkbeck was preparing a report for the Augusto board, suggesting the company set up break-out brands to represent the various activities covered by the business – events, TV and a new tech innovation arm that encompasses Coach Mate, an app designed to help kids stick with sport by upskilling coaches.
“So I was putting together this proposal late at night to take to the board. I needed a name for the tech one. I was like: UFO Rodeo. It was just there. I went in the next day, and I was like, ‘The tech department mates could be called UFO Rodeo.’”
Got the T-shirt
The name didn’t land, but it did strike a chord. Fast forward to the next board meeting. “One of our board members threw us all these black T-shirts. We opened them up and they’d made UFO Rodeo merch.
“We put the T-shirts on and go, ‘It’s now become a thing.’
“At that board meeting we decided we need a new group name, because you can’t have this suite of four or five companies and one of them be Augusto and us be called Augusto Group. It puts too much focus on one company when all the companies need to sit side by side, not in a hierarchy.”
People in the meeting looked at their T-shirts… and in an almost supernatural twist, the company name was looking right back at them.
So the merch came first?
“The merch came first,” laughs Kirkbeck. “It’s making itself – the board members are making the merch for us!
“So the name sort of came out of nowhere.”
But it does align with a piece of advice dispensed many years before.
“Early on, when we were trying to come up with a name for Augusto, our very first Creative Director, Oliver Maisey, said it should mean something, but not be specific to what you are.
“We were starting out as a video company back then. So, if you call yourself Leon and Michelle’s Great Video Company, when you want to get into design or an app, what then?”
Stories at the heart
Hence Augusto – an overlap of august (respected) and gusto (enthusiasm) – that has meaning, but remains non-specific.
“Same thing with UFO Rodeo,” says Kirbeck.
Or perhaps the truth is simpler: “I just freaking love UFOs. But also I think about storytelling, and all of the different facets of the company are storytellers at the core.
“If you think about a UFO sighting, very few people have credible video footage of a UFO. Inevitably what happens is that somebody sees one – and to be believed, they need to come back and be a great storyteller to say what they saw and then recount it. And whether they are believed or not by their friends and family and peers is a measure of how good a job they do at telling the story.”
UFO Rodeo is a name that means everything and nothing – and it reminds everyone that storytelling is at the heart of what they do.
Will it catch on? Kirkbeck hopes the company and the name will last 100 years. But he’s realistic, too.
“It’ll either become a thing and people talk about it in the future or it’s just for our accountant.”
This was first published in the December-Janaury 2024/2025 NZ Marketing Magazine issue. Subscribe here.
